Wrote this about eighteen months ago, odd to reread it now and see how overly stylized it feels. Needs revising, some factual details I want to fix, and a coda to add. Then I’ll likely submit it to somewhere before the end of the year.
Month: November 2014
Workflow
Think I am over my romance with OpenOffice. Just too freakishly hard to open .odt files when I am not at home in front of my laptop.
Random Encounters
Not often that I have a meaningful conversation while waiting for the bus. Usually I am approached by people who want a cigarette (I don’t smoke), to know how long until the next bus (because I am either psychic or they are too lazy to stop texting and check on their own smart phone), or if I have found Jesus (pretty sure he is dead, not a missing person, but then again it’s been a while since I’ve seen a milk carton with missing person ads printed on the side). So I wasn’t expecting the talk I had Saturday night.
Prose: The Man Who Took Away The Sky
An excerpt from the manuscript I wrote over the summer. Over winter break I plan to revise the entire manuscript, and to adapt this section to work also as a stand-alone short story.
Poetry : Gilbert & Rome
reading Jack Gilbert
mourning his dead wife
the grey sky outside
Continue reading “Poetry : Gilbert & Rome”
The Prose of Erpenbeck
Reading The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck has been pretty impressive. She writes with an eye that both includes the grimier details of life (keeping the story grounded) but also with an almost dreamlike style of narration (that leaves you adrift in the story). It is an impressive combination of the two that has me trying to dissect how exactly she makes it work so I can try to use it in my writing.
Musings on Death
Thinking about death, about how people write about and view death, for my long essay for class. Reading some poems by Jack Gilbert, thinking about my own encounters with death, and trying to put this all together.
Poetry: NW Portland @ 10 AM
November chill hits as the bus pulls away,
Her warmth absent now from my arms,
Tale of one city but two schools.
I pass a group of four hoody’ed guys,
One slurs, “I like all the little shops.”
10 am and already stoned, life on 21st.
I Miss Literary Theory
Looking over my prospectus, my thesis, and the list of responses I have written so far this term fills me with an odd mix of shame and dread. I hate most everything I have written for the class, they feel like a mix of random bits of nonsense I threw together to complete an assignment or glimpses of the inside of my head that I’d rather not have shared.